After a number of other shows Bannon hit France, where his speech at the Front National Conference was a major event. (Politico)

Steve Bannon, the former Trump strategist and “alt-right” publisher, capped a European tour this week by urging a gathering of France’s struggling National Front party to stand by their populist guns.

“Let them call you racists,” Bannon told a party congress in Lille on Saturday, according to a video of the speech. “Let them call you xenophobes. Let them call you nativists. Wear it as a badge of honor.”

The former editor of right-leaning Breitbart News had helped the President shape his “America First” agenda and met with National Front leader Marine Le Pen, known for her controversial anti-immigration views.

“You’re part of a worldwide movement bigger than France, bigger than Italy,” he told a cheering crowd in Lille, France for the party’s convention. Ms Le Pen said inviting Mr Bannon to speak was important because he was “the architect of Donald Trump’s victory”. She also cited his views on giving regular people “power, which in his mind and mine, too, has been practically illegally captured by the elite”.

The fanfare over Bannon is a distraction from the glaring paradox of this otherwise largely technical party convention, one poised to reinstate Marine Le Pen as leader even as faith in her leadership has indisputably waned.

She has looked to stir up excitement for the party name change she will suggest on stage Sunday, a rebranding set to put the 49-year-old’s indelible stamp on a party she took over in 2011 from her rabble-rousing father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who founded it in 1972.

Hellbent on “de-demonising” the National Front in the public eye, Marine Le Pen made a show of snubbing the shaved-head and bomber-jacket types fond of her father and touting an economic programme that vilified the Euro currency and advocated a state that protects the vulnerable (or at least the ones who hold French passports). Reaping the rewards of nascent respectability in one election after another, she built a stable of elected officials at nearly every level of government. Advocates claim that changing the ostensibly sulphurous name is a necessary next step, the last obstacle to political alliances that would finally carry the FN to power.

But members seem sceptical. According to the party’s own unverifiable numbers, only 52 percent of members who bothered to return a questionnaire approve of calling the party anything else.

From being considered “Decisive” by 80% of those polled in February 2017, she has dropped to 66%. The assessment of her ability to take decisions has fallen from 69% to 49%. There is a drop of 9 points, to 40% who consider she grasps their problems. Eroding from 2016 downwards, the cap to appeal beyond her own side has gone down 12 points to 30%/ She was judged warm and kind a year ago by 30% of the respondents, this stands now at 25%. Finally, only 16% (as opposed to 24% a year back) think she would make a good |President of the Republic.

Some might consider this a good score for an acerbic apprentice dictator, but it is unlikely to please her party activists.

This notes the surprise at the invitation, and the not entirely happy reaction of some party activists, who rushed to declare (in view one imagines of Trump’s popularity in France) that there was no formal “alliance” between the FN and Breitbart.

The war began some time back but reached a pic a few days ago when Philippot was found in a Couscousserie .

His one-time comrades in the FN accused him of “collaboration” (espèce de collabo... ) for eating the Arab dish (this one is beyond me, I have eaten Couscous in a restaurant run by Pieds-noirs).

Philippot, apart from being the major player behind the move to make Marine le Pen acceptable, playing down anti-Semitism and racism generally, and being liberal on gay issues (he is gay), s best known as a virulent ‘sovereigntist’ who has applied to the ‘left’ nationalist strain of the same name. On the radio this morning the name of former Socialist Minister and arch sovereigntist, Jean–Pierre Chevènement got mentioned in this context.

Florian Philippot, for many years the closest aide of French far-right politician Marine Le Pen, said on Thursday he was quitting the National Front party, opening up a likely split in the country’s far-right ranks.

Philippot, whose responsibilities for strategy and communications were earlier removed by Le Pen, told France 2 television that he did not like being “ridiculed”.

“They told me that I was vice-president of nothing,” he said. “Listen, I don’t have a desire to be ridiculed. I have never had the desire to do nothing, so of course I am quitting the National Front.”

Philippot’s departure is a big blow for the far-right as it struggles to portray itself as the main opposition to President Emmanuel Macron.

After Philippot’s announcement Thursday, the leader of the National Front said she was ‘sad’ about his decision.

“It’s sad to witness such a waste, but unfortunately, since this is how he wanted things, it can’t be stopped,” Le Pen told Le Figaro. “There were many attempts to reason with him, but they were always rejected.”

“The National Front is in a period of crisis,” RFI’s political editor Philip Turle told FRANCE 24. “Marine Le Pen’s tenure is no longer assured.”

Cracks have been appearing ever since the party’s election defeat earlier this year. After the National Front lost to centrist president Emmanuel Macron, Philippot started his own group ‘The Patriots’. His movement fast became a source of tension but when Marine Le Pen asked Philippot to leave it, he refused.

Philippot wanted to steer the party away from its traditional anti-immigration focus towards economic nationalism. His rivals in the National Front blame him for turning off many voters by pushing France to quit the European Union and leave the eurozone.

But Marine Le Pen appears not to want to soften her party’s stance on the issue.

“National sovereignty is a mainstay of our struggle,” she told LCP television on Thursday morning. “We will continue to fight the European Union with all our soul because it is an instrument for the elimination and impoverishment of our people.”

The firing earlier this month of regional official Sophie Montel, a close friend of Philippot, set off more sparks. Montel was a vice president of Philippot’s association. Shortly before she was fired, Montel said that the party was “re-toxifying”.

Party officials believe the rift between leading party figures over policy has drawn supporters to other parties, including to the far-left party of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who is emerging as the main opposition.

For reasons most people will find hard to grasp a rude article about French President Macron in the New York Times, a paper of very limited circulation in France, or indeed elsewhere in Europe, including Britain (this is the first time I have read anything in it since…for ever), has been met by outraged brouhaha in France.

One thing that is easy to get is the idea that “fake news” is spreading like bad margarine over our daily political bread.

Libération today has this article, a factual piece in answer to claims that it was an editorial (apparently somebody can’t tell the difference between Op-ed, an American expression which I think means opinion piece), Editorial and report, and (Confusion entre tribune d’opinion, édito et article.) as well as demolishing the idea that the author is a Le Pen supporter.

President Emmanuel Macron of France is liberalism’s new poster boy. Hailed as the answer to Europe’s populist tide, he has brought a buzz back into French diplomacy by facing down President Trump and President Vladimir Putin of Russia. “The Macron method,” a leading European think tank gushed recently, is the new Third Way, threading the needle between technocracy and populism.

At home in France, it’s a very different story. A recent poll found that Mr. Macron’s popularity fell by 14 points in August, after a fall of 10 points in July. Only 40 percent of respondents said they were satisfied with the president’s performance.

To be fair, Mr. Macron never had much popular support to begin with. In the first round of the presidential election in April, when the vote was split among four main contenders, he won just under 24 percent. (By comparison, François Hollande received 28 percent of the vote in the first round in 2012. Nicolas Sarkozy won 31 percent in 2007.) Mr. Macron won the second round handily, but only because he was the lesser-evil candidate in the runoff — his competitor was Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right populist National Front party.

Electoral arithmetic explains only so much. Mr. Macron’s popularity suffers from something more fundamental: Macronism. His entire political project has been far too focused on his personality. Much of his appeal has come from his youth, his dynamism, his good looks and his oratorical skills. This hyper-personalized approach always carried the risk that once his charm wore off, there would be nothing left for his supporters to like, which is exactly what is happening.

Since taking office, Mr. Macron has put off many people by trying to recapture the grandeur of the presidency. In a phrase that may stick to him for the rest of his time in office, he said he wanted to make the presidency more “Jupiterian,” comparing himself with the powerful Roman god Jupiter, who ruled the skies. When he brought the Senate and Parliament together at the Versailles palace and spoke to them about his ambitions for the presidency, many in France bristled at the monarchical overtones.

The above Chris Bickerton, who shows few signs of more knowledge of French politics than can be picked up from a few newspaper articles, is a pro-Brexit tosser, claiming to be on the internationalist ‘left’ for reasons which remain obscure but are apparently linked to the idea that being anti-EU is a hand of friendship to the world, whose views count for very little anywhere.

I believe we can make this into the basis for a new internationalism in Europe, one that gives Europe a political meaning far more profound than the shallow cosmopolitanism that comes with the economic integration of the single market. A vote for Brexit is also a universal message to all other Europeans that politics can be about change and not just about defending the status quo.

The main interest of the story, apart from indicating the mechanisms of fake-news, is that it shows just how twitchy Macron’s mates are.

The decision came after a two-day, closed-door meeting at the group’s headquarters west of Paris, to learn the lessons of May’s presidential election that saw its candidate Marine Le Pen lose by double digits.

But while the policy position remains, a statement said it had been pushed back to the end of the five-year term of any future FN government, in what appeared to be a concession to critics.

Some inside the party — and many commentators outside — think this issue helped sink Le Pen’s campaign.

And according to some of those present at the meeting, several of the group’s leading members abstained in a vote on the final text.

In parliamentary elections just weeks later, the FN won a mere eight seats in the 577-member National Assembly, missing its target of 15, as Macron’s centrist party captured a comfortable majority.

As late as Friday, FN secretary general Nicolas Bay told FranceInfo radio he thought the party could reverse its stance on the question of an exit from the euro.

“I think we need to listen to what the French people said,” he told the broadcaster. “We did not convince people with this idea.”

But the party’s deputy leader Florian Philippot, a strong supporter of the euro withdrawal policy, had warned against abandoning it.

He insists the party needs to speak to French voters “on issues beyond the traditional subjects of the National Front, such as immigration and crime”.

Le Pen herself has said the FN will hold a “wide consultation” with party members, probably in September.

Le Monde talks of the FN “Tearing itself apart” over the issue and over whether to keep its line based on triple themes of “security-immigration and identity”, advocated by the hard-line Florian Philippot and his opponents whoa rgue that modifying their programme on these issues is a condition for a new “union of the (nationalist) Rights.

She has, to put it mildly, ‘form’ on French Politics saying that the Front National is “basically on the left”. And indeed on British Politics, where she warmed to UKIP’s views on European immigration (Diana Johnstone’s poisonous nativism) (1)

In her most recent contribution (21st of April) to the favourite journal of ‘wise-guys’ who want the ‘low down’ on politics, this is her view on tomorrow’s French Presidential election.

Standard media treatment sticks to a simple left-right dualism: “racist” rejection of immigrants is the main issue and that what matters most is to “stop Marine Le Pen!”

Going from there to here is like walking through Alice’s looking glass. Almost everything is turned around.

But wise up!

Sovereignty” has become a bad word in the mainstream left.

National sovereignty is an essentially defensive concept. It is about staying home and minding one’s own business. It is the opposite of the aggressive nationalism that inspired fascist Italy and Nazi Germany to conquer other countries, depriving them of their national sovereignty.

The confusion is due to the fact that most of what calls itself “the left” in the West has been totally won over to the current form of imperialism – aka “globalization”. It is an imperialism of a new type, centered on the use of military force and “soft” power to enable transnational finance to penetrate every corner of the earth and thus to reshape all societies in the endless quest for profitable return on capital investment. The left has been won over to this new imperialism because it advances under the banner of “human rights” and “antiracism” – abstractions which a whole generation has been indoctrinated to consider the central, if not the only, political issues of our times.

The fact that “sovereignism” is growing in Europe is interpreted by mainstream globalist media as proof that “Europe is moving to the right”– no doubt because Europeans are “racist”. This interpretation is biased and dangerous. People in more and more European nations are calling for national sovereignty precisely because they have lost it. They lost it to the European Union, and they want it back.

Follow the scare quotes, “human rights” “anti-racism“….

The bedrock ideas of our forebears, like Jean Jaurès are human rights, anti-racism, and anti-capitalism, or put better socialism, not this bogus national sovereignty “anti-imperialism of fools.”

Not for her.

Sovereigntism is a good thing,

That is why the British voted to leave the European Union. Not because they are “racist”, but primarily because they cherish their historic tradition of self-rule.

Not to mention, to a US audience surely without a need to point it out, ruling lots of other people…

Johnstone is torn in the French elections,

A most remarkable feature of this campaign is great similarity between the two candidates said to represent “the far left”, Mélenchon, and “the far right”, Marine Le Pen. Both speak of leaving the euro. Both vow to negotiate with the EU to get better treaty terms for France. Both advocate social policies to benefit workers and low income people. Both want to normalize relations with Russia. Both want to leave NATO, or at least its military command. Both defend national sovereignty, and can thus be described as “sovereignists”.

In a country suffering from unemployment, without jobs or housing to accommodate mass immigration, and under the ongoing threat of Islamist terror attacks, the issue cannot be reasonably reduced to “racism” – unless Islamic terrorists constitute a “race”, for which there is no evidence. Le Pen insists that all French citizens deserve equal treatment regardless of their origins, race or religion. She is certain to get considerable support from recently nationalized immigrants, just as she now gets a majority of working class votes. If this is “fascism”, it has changed a lot in the past seventy years.

So that’s all right then.

Human rights bleeding hearts and internationalist globalisers might remarks that giving national preference to the French in jobs and housing, chanting “on est chez nous”, claiming that the French have fewer rights than foreign residents(“les Français ont parfois moins de droits en France que des étrangers, même clandestins”) restricting free schooling to French citizens, and systematically linking terrorism to immigration is about as racist as you get.(Immigration et terrorisme : Marine Le Pen multiplie les intox.)

Then there is this,

The globalist media are already preparing to blame the eventual election of a “sovereignist” candidate on Vladimir Putin. Public opinion in the West is being prepared for massive protests to break out against an undesired winner, and the “antifa” militants are ready to wreak havoc in the streets. Some people who like Marine Le Pen are afraid of voting for her, fearing the “color revolution” sure to be mounted against her. Mélenchon and even Fillon might face similar problems.

Against the views of the “globalist media” Johnstone concludes,

By far the most fundamental emerging issue in this campaign is the conflict between the European Union and national sovereignty.

That Counterpunch claiming to be on the left, publishes Johnstone’s defence of the ‘nation’ against the EU is, well, not unexpected.

(1) In April 2012, she wrote about the first round of the French Presidential elections a few days earlier and identified Front National leader Marine Le Pen as “notably” “basically on the left” while also labelling Le Pen as “demagogic”.[9] She also rejected claims Le Pen is antisemitic: “There is absolutely nothing attesting to anti-Semitism on the part of Marine Le Pen. She has actually tried to woo the powerful Jewish organisations, and her anti-Islam stance is also a way to woo such groups” Wikipedia.

President Vladimir Putin met French far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen in the Kremlin on Friday and told her Russia had no intention of interfering in France’s presidential election.

Le Pen, who has said she admires the Russian leader, was visiting Russia at the invitation of Leonid Slutsky, head of the lower house of parliament’s foreign affairs committee, Russian news agencies reported.

State TV showed Putin telling Le Pen Moscow reserved the right to meet any French politician it wanted.

Interfax : “PUTIN AT MEETING WITH MARINE LE PEN: RUSSIA HAS ABSOLUTELY NO INTENTION TO INFLUENCE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION IN FRANCE YET RESERVES RIGHT TO SPEAK WITH REPRESENTATIVES OF ANY POLITICAL FORCES.

French far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen was due in Moscow on Friday for meetings with lawmakers less than a month before a presidential election clouded by allegations of Russian interference.

The leader of the National Front, an anti-immigrant and anti-European Union party, is seeking to bolster her international credentials ahead of the two-round French election on April 23 and May 7.

Her visit comes on the heels of a trip this week to Chad, base of a French military operation that’s aimed at rooting out Islamic extremists from a swath of Africa.

The head of the Russian Duma’s international affairs committee, Leonid Slutsky, was quoted by the Tass news agency as saying Le Pen would hold meetings on the “international agenda such as the war on terrorism”.

There was no official word as to whether the French far-right leader would meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom she has described as “good for world peace”.

“I believe that barring parliamentarians from speaking to each other, working together is an infringement of democratic rights,” Interfax quoted her as saying in a meeting with Duma speaker Vyacheslav Volodin. She vowed to push for the so-called “blacklists” of targeted invidivudals to be abolished. Ms Le Pen also said that Russia and France should work together to save the world from globalism and Islamic fundamentalism, Interfax said.

Marine le Pen is liked in Moscow, because she backs breaking up the European Union, lifting sanctions against Russia, and, above all, recognition of the Russian annexation of Crimea. The Front National had also sent a representative as an observer during the referendum in Crimea on joining Russia, which claimed that the vote was free and fair. This attitude convinced the Kremlin to take a friendly stand on the extreme right movement.

When, at the end of 2014, the FN needed money, a Russian bank, the FCRB, agreed to lend it 9 million Euros, before having its licence withdrawn a few months later. Relations have nevertheless remained cordial between the FN and Moscow, where Marine Le Pen is regularly met figures as important at the President of Parliament. Has she been received by higher levels? If she has, it not been official.

As part of its detailed analysis of the FN programme Mediapart (Le programme Le Pen 2017 au scanner de Mediapart) notes that,

As part of its modernisation the far-right Front National, at present topping polls for the first round of the French Presidential elections but slipping fast, claimed to have dropped any association with anti-Semitism, and all forms of race hate.

Today a spanner was put in the well-oiled works of Marine Le Pen’s party.

The documentary, filmed, like revelations in UK parties, undercover, showed Benoît Loeuillet, head of the FN in Nice, casting doubt of the number of deaths in the Shoah, and citing the negationist “Leuchter report” associated with Holocaust denier M. Faurisson. The councillor declared, “Il n’y a pas eu de morts de masse comme ça a été dit” there were not the mass deaths as has been said.

The film, to be broadcast tonight, is also revealing about the pervasive racism inside the FN something that English language reports on this have so far not explored Another councillor, Philippe Vardon, is shown complaining that all the people he shakes hands with are blacks (“Ça commence à être inquiétant : tous les mecs qui me serrent la main, ils sont noirs”). (le Monde)

The message is that not only is Holocuast denial far from extinct within the FN but that close links with the cultural racist “identitaires” movement is at the heart of the far-right party.

Guardian report: France’s Front National suspends party official over Holocaust denial.

France’s far-right Front National has suspended a party official for Holocaust denial after he suggested there was no mass killing in the Nazi concentration camps.

Benoît Loeuillet, head of the FN in Nice, was secretly filmed making the comments, which will be broadcast in a documentary. “I don’t think there were that many deaths … during the Shoah,” he is heard saying.

Jean-Marie Le Pen fined again for dismissing Holocaust as ‘detail’

Asked by the journalist filming him about Holocaust deniers, Loeuillet, said: “I don’t really know what to think. It’s complicated … there weren’t 6 million [deaths]. There weren’t mass deaths as we’ve been told.”

The film-makers, from TV Press Productions, had asked to follow the FN in the Alpes-Maritimes region earlier this year to understand why so many young voters support the far-right party led by Marine Le Pen, a frontrunner for the first round of France’s presidential election at the end of April.